Slow speeds

A lot of you have been complaining about slow speeds or rather a reduction in the speeds you used to have. You also complain that when you call in, tech support knows nothing about it and when you show them proof, they really don't do anything but reset and bypass your router and clear your cookies and cache.

There is a wide variation in speeds on the OOL network. I've seen ftp downloads from the OOL ftp server range from 400 kB/s to 1.1MB kB/s. It's a dirty little secret but management has an acceptable minimum speed. If the acceptable minimum doesn't live up to the advertised 3 times faster than DSL, tough. OOL is 3 times faster than DSL on average. If you are below the top of the bell curve, too bad. (<==Management's viewpoint, not mine, don't flame me now!)

Now what is causing these slowdowns? We have no idea. There is a culture of secrecy at Cablevision, everything is on a need to know basis. That is why when you call in with proof of your slowdown, we have no idea there is a problem because the networking groups (who I'm sure have tons of reports on all their systems and know to the kb/s what is the speed on the UBRs) don't tell us. The call center has to figure out there is a problem by analyzing call volume over a period of time. We then open an outage and we'll see it sit for weeks while the network groups do nothing. One day I'll come in and the outage is off the Outage board. Did they fix it? Who knows? But I doubt it and I'm sure I'll be getting some more calls from people in that area and I'll have to blame their slowdown on "There are no problems in your area so something must be running on your PC that is causing it".